Noam Chomsky Quotes

It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.

I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made.

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

Tied up with his dismissal of natural law is Hayek's continuous, and all-pervasive, attack on reason. Reason is his bete noire, and time and time again, from numerous and even contradictory standpoints, he opposes it.

The mind gives meaning to anything but the meaning it gives is meaningless.

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

Ridicule may be the evidence of with or bitterness and may gratify a little mind, or an ungenerous temper, but it is no test of reason or truth.

Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.

Don’t see the mind for more than it is, but don’t misread it for all that it can be.

Men do not often dare to avow, even to themselves, the slow progress reason has made in their minds; but they are ready to follow it if it is presented to them in a lively and striking manner, and forces them to recognize it.

Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality.

That which enters the mind through reason can be corrected. That which is admitted through faith, hardly ever.

The human mind may perceive truth only through thinking, as is clear from Augustine.

Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness ot to answer any question we are capable of asking.

We can only learn so much about our minds, because we are using our minds to do so.

Any model we make does not describe the universe it describes what our brains are capable of saying at this time.

The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.

Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.

The very properties of the human mind that provide an enormous scope for human genius in some domains will serve as barriers to progress in other domains, just as the properties that enable each child to acquire a complex and highly articulated human language block the acquisition of other imaginable linguistic systems.

The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That's the trouble with women, too.

We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.

To accept reason is impossible if you don't already possess it.